It seems self-evident to me that my happiness has been suppressed by evil powerbrokers. They may be hard to spot, but you and I both know that they’re there. And it seems self-evident to me—as, I’m sure it does to all right-thinking people—that my happiness is closely tied to copious sex with plentiful nymphets. (A happiness, incidentally, denied me by those same EPBs [evil powerbrokers] who’ve spent millennia convincing my wife and those curiously-hesitant nymphets that this clearly sacred free sex is somehow a bad idea.) Jesus himself was all for it! (If, yes, not so clearly in those specious books of the Bible…or even, technically, in those wacky Gnostic gospels that came out maybe a century afterwards and have recently been tied to this argument, whose Jesus is not so much libidinous as…frankly, weird.) And the Bible...don’t get me started! All that morality/shmorality spun out by the original spin masters of the Church—those uber-EPBs who shamelessly leveraged their so-called “persecuted” status in the first two centuries (all that thrown-to-the-lions grandstanding—give it a rest!) in service of their repressive story of this murdered and resurrected messiah who offered some kind of recharged life and connection to God and others. As if! Where’s the sex appeal in that? Seems more like a cold shower to me!

It’s fun to think that secret super-villains run the world and have always run the world. And it’s fun to see life as a quest to get in on the secret—both to take down The Man and to reap the rewards that the secret itself offers. Gnostic secrets are sort of like winning the lottery—not only do I win, but you don’t! It’s fun to feel vaguely victimized and suspicious and low-level hacked-off. I cycle through all of these things. But what if the actual life that you and I actually want turns out not to be found in shadowy catacombs but in bright open spaces? What if the deepest truths in life are not cryptograms but can be seen not only by looking out your window but also by talking to that new friend you just met in the café who’s excited about that faith they’ve just discovered or rediscovered?

Faith inspired by the New Testament is often criticized for being evangelistic, for wanting to let other people in on the ongoing party that—who knew?—actually seems to be happening even as we speak. But couldn’t we actually see that as a good thing? That the faith discovered there was never meant to be elitist or exclusive but offered to everybody, to people we like and people we don’t, to people like us and people we can’t relate to at all. Isn’t it the periodic re-interest in Gnostic faith that runs the risk of being elitist and anti-human? In its take on ultimate truth, only a very few will ever get it and they’re sworn to secrecy while the rest of the world burns.

And, truth be told, in the middle of my periodic forays into suspicion of the EPBs and search for secrets, I don’t find myself very happy. Instead, I find my pleasures in smugness and indignation, which soon can feel like thin gruel to my soul. What if, as CS Lewis wrote, in those moments I’m settling for mud pies in the slums when infinite joy is being offered to me?

Who knows? Despite its loopy take on nefarious spiritual cover-ups, I may see The Da Vinci Code. And I may well have a great time with its ominous twists and shocking murders by people allegedly Of The Cloth. And, certainly, the mind reels at the possibilities of those sacred sex moments.

But as I leave the theater, I hope I’ll take a deep breath of fresh air, have a laugh, and return to my preferred work of finding the kind of richness of life and soul that a living God seems so—dare I say?—openly eager to offer.